Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau: Recipients of the 2001 Derek De Solla Price Award

Scientometrics, 54(1): p.3-10, 2002

Jointly published by Akadëmiai KiadO. Budapest Scientoinetries, and KluwerAcademic Publishers, Dordrecht Vol. 54, No. 1(2002) 3—4

Leo Eggbe and Ronald R. Rousseau win the 2001 Derek John de Solla Price Award

The Editorial and Advisory Eoard and the Publishers of Scientometrics are glad to announce that the 2001 Derek John de Solla Price Medal has been awarded to LEO EGOHE and RONALD R. ROUSSEAU for their distinguished contributions to the field of scientometrics.

LEO EGGHE, RONALD ROUSSEAU. the winner of the the winner of the 2001 Derek John de Solla Price Medal 2001 Derek John de Solla Price Medal

Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau: Recipients of the 2001 Derek de Solla Price Award

I. K. RAVICHANDRA RAO

It is a great pleasure for me to say a few words about Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau who have received the Derek de Solla Price Medal (2001). Both Egghe and Rousseau are popularly known as bibliometricians/informetricians and as some believe that they are non-scientometricians. All of us here agree with me that it is very difficult to distinguish informetrics and scientometrics, because of the very nature of their scope and definitions. In this context, I personally believe that whether they are known as informetricians or scientometricians this award to them is long overdue. Both the scholars have dedicated themselves to the area of Informetrics and most of their research is centered on development of mathematical models to explain informetric phenomena. This is particularly true for Dr. Egghe. Dr. Rousseau has worked in some areas of librarianship as well. Leo Egghe as well as Ronald Rousseau have their root in Mathematics and have published considerably in Mathematics. In the early years of his career, Dr. Egghe chose Prof. B. C. Brookes as his guru and worked under his guidance for his second thesis in Information Science. Dr. Rouseeau’s Promoter for his second thesis on Concentration and Diversity in Informetrics was Dr. Egghe. My association with both of them began in 1987, since the first conference of Informetrics held in Diepenbeek. I had the opportunity to work with both of them since then. For me it is an important collaboration. It is amazing to know their concern in giving importance to the real life situations as well as to applications while developing informetric and scientometric models.

LEO C. J. EGGHIE’ A Profile of an Informetrician

Leo Camiel Jeannette Egghe popularly known as Leo Egghe has had a distinguished academic career before receiving this year’s Price award. He received his doctorate degree in Mathematics in 1978 from Universitaire Instelling Antwepen (UIA); he wrote

his first thesis on ‘study of geometry and martiugales in locally convex spaces and of topology and amarts in Banach spaces’, under the guidance of Prof. Dr. J. A. Van Casteren. His second thesis was in Information Science on the ‘Duality of information systems with applications to the empirical laws’. He wrote it under the supervision of the late Prof. B. C. Brookes, City University, London, in 1989. Since 1984, he is working in the Library of Limburg University Campus in various capacities. At present he is the University Librarian. He had attended and presented papers at over forty national and international conferences on Mathematics, Informetrics and Scientometrics. He has delivered invited talks in several countries around the world. He is associated with International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics in various capacities such as Program chair, Regional chair, Program committee member, etc., since 1987. In fact, he was responsible for the first conference on informetrics and scientometrcs held at Diepenbeek in Belgium. He was even responsible for and a key person in the foundation of the International Society for Scinetometrics and Informetrics. Dr. Egghe has published a number of scholarly papers in international journals in the areas of Mathematics, Informetrics and Scientometrics. He has visited manyinstitutions. Some of the institutions he visited in various capacities are

University of Kisangani & Kinshasa in Zaire; University Instelling Antwerp, Belgium; University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; The Ohio State University, USA; Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA; City University, London, UK; Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, India; Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre, NewDelhi, India; National Institute of Oceanography, Goa; Central Leather Research Institute, Chennai, India; University of Mysore, Mysore, India; Madras University, India etc.

He is a member of the several professional bodies both at the national and international levels. He is at present the President of the Council of Flemish Scientific Libraries. He is a member of the advisory board of Scientotnetrics. He is also a member of the Commission for nomination and promotion of the Royal Library of Belgium.

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He is the coordinator of the development project RICOSCIX-WIO, which was an initiative of LUC; the project is being carried out in Mombasa, Kenya. This project has several collaborators with many international organizations, such as UNESCO. He has published several books; among them the following three are particularly important: Stopping Time Techniques to Analysis and Probability; Introduction to Informetrics (also translated into Chinese); Elementary Statistics to Effective Library and Information Service Management.

He, together with Dr. Rousseau, edited the Proceedings of the first two International Conferences on Informetrics and Scientometrics. He was also invited to write articles in the Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology and in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. In November 1999, he delivered the well-known series of “Sarada Ranganathan Endowment Lectures”, under the auspices of Sarada Ranganathan Endowment at Institute of Information Studies in Bangalore. He has published more than 140 research papers in scholarly journals. Some of the areas of his interests are: 1. Classical Informetrics Laws: • Information Production, Processes and related empirical laws including theories; • Explanation of informetric laws; • Duality in IPPs; • Informetric approximations; 2. Success-breeds-success phenomenon; 3. Concentration theory, studies of Lorenz curve, 80/20 rule, etc.; 4. Citation analysis, including obsolescence studies and aging, growth of literature, etc.; 5. Collaboration and collaborative measures, etc.; 6. Ranking problems in ~cientometrics & Informetrics; 7. New informetric aspects of the Internet; 8. Information retrieval; 9. Martingale theory; 10. Econometrics. In some of his research work Dr. Egghe concentrated on the problems with the ranking of average scores of scientific groups. (Groups may refer to journals, authors, countries, disciplines, etc.; the number of citations received, number of publications,

Scien/ometrjcs 54(2002) 7 1. K. RAvlcHAr’lDi~.4RAO:Dc Solla Price Award 2001

aging or prices of journals, etc. may be considered as the scores). Generally, arithmetic mean is used to explain these scores; but in the case of ranking an entity Egghe strongly argued and advised geometric mean, instead. As a part of his research, Egghe reviewed the influence of factors such as publication delay and the growth on the age distribution of documents. He also worked on the influence of growth on utilization distribution. He observed that all these influences can be studied using convolutions of operators between distribution functions. Dr. Egghe even worked in the area of success-breeds-success phenomenon. He worked on several generalizations of the phenomenon particularly to discuss information production process that occur in informetrics. His works extends the success-breed-success principles of Simon and De Solla Price. Egghe even worked on the informetric aspects of Internet. He made an attempt to investigate the new world (Virtual Reality) of Internet and the challenges that it offers for Informetrics research and, in particular, he attempts to analyze • The problems of data gathering; • Internet version of theinformetric laws; • Scientometric aspects of the Internet — Can the clickable buttons (hyperlinks) in web pages replace the role of classical laws? • References in journalldocuments — Is there anything like web impact factor? • Search engines in the context of information retrieval-can we apply recall and precision measures to evaluate search engines? • Fractal nature of the Internet. Dr. Egghe in his earlier works since the mid-80s has published several papers, giving mathematical proofs and/or analytical explanations for many of the problems in Informetrics. In his Sarad Ranganathan Endowment lectures at Bangalore in November 1999, he has explained most of these problems, and has illustrated his theory with a number of empirical observations wherever necessary. He carried out most of his research jointly with Dr. Rousseau. Dr. Egghe is married to Maria de Bock in 1974, and they have three children. Ms. De Bock is a professionally trained nurse and she is working in a local hospital in Hasselt.

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RONALD ROUSSEAU: A Profile of an Informetrician

Dr. Ronald Rousseau, a widely acclaimed scientist in Informetrics and Scientometrics had his doctorate degree in mathematics from University of Leuven, KUL, in 1977. In 1992, he had taken his second doctorate degree in Library and Information Science from University of Antwerp under the supervision of Dr. Leo Egghe. His second thesis was on “Concentration and Diversity in Informetric Research”. Dr. Rousseau is currently working as Associate Professor in the Catholic School for Higher Education, Oostende, Belgium. He is also working as Guest Professor in School of Library and Information Science of the University of Antwerp. He teaches Knowledge Representation for post-graduate students. He is also a post-doctoral associate at Limburgs University, Diepenbeek, Belgium. Dr. Rousseau is a mathematician turned into a Library and Information Scientist. Rousseau has worked in almost all areas of Library and Information Science. He has published more than 130 research publications. He has also published a couple of papers in Mathematics and Ecology. Dr. Rousseau is honored by a number of awards and prizes. In 1979, he received the prize of Belgian Academy of Science. In 1981 he was selected for NATO scholarship. He was a Fullbright scholar in 1981. Henan Normal University in China honored him through Honorary Professorship in 2001. He is a member of numerous learned societies and associations. He is a member of the advisory board of Chinese Scienrometric Indicators. He is a member of the advisory board of Scientometrics and in the editorial board of Cybermetrics. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Chinese Science Citation Index. Dr. Rousseau was the brain behind the first International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics held in Belgium. He, together with Dr. Egghe, took keen interest in its success. Dr. Rousseau visited many countries including China, India, and many of the European countries as visiting scientist as well as to participate in international conferences. Dr. Rousseau has authored three books. His first book came out in 1981 entitled Extended Covariant Systemi He co-authored two books with Leo Egghe on Scientometrics (Introduction to Informetrics: Quantitative Methods in Library, Documentation and Information Science) and Statistics (Elementary Statistics for Effective Library and Information Service Management). Jointly with Egghe, he edited the first two proceedings of the conference on Informetrics held in Belgium and in Canada.

Scientomerrics 54 (2002) 9 I. K. RAVICHANDRA RAo: Dc Solia Price Award 2001

Dr. Rousseau has worked in almost all areas of Scientometrics, Bibliometrics and Library and Information Science. Some of his research works are centered on • Classical laws of informetrics; • Citation studies; • Growth and obsolescence of literature; • Concentration theory; • Information retrieval, etc.

In addition to Informetrics and Scientometrics, Rousseau has contributed to many aspects of library science. Some of his contribution~fall in the areas of user studies and services, automatic text analysis, World Wide Web, archives, collection development, technical services, knowledge based systems, public libraries, librarianship, research methods, library committee, etc. Dr. Rousseau is married to Myrian Salembier who teaches physics and mathematics at the school for adult education Westhoek—Westkust, Campus HTI, Oostende. They have three children.

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